There is no doubt that one of the most defining activities of an EU project manager is …. travelling. Besides management tools, application forms, budgets, and reporting, a trolley is also an important “utensil” of our job. There are many reasons why Project managers are on a plane or a train: a Transnational Partners’ Meeting, an extended training activity in the frame of a project development, a study visit, and a preparatory visit for the design of a new proposal or networking purposes.
For sure, in our profession, we are repeatedly recognised as the ones “who travel abroad” and therefore the object of some envy. But is travelling always that fun? Indeed, it is, but to be honest there are also distasteful moments that are not cool. Let’s see the two sides of the coin.
What are the pleasing aspects and the enjoyable elements of travelling in our job?
Besides any personal good reason for travelling there are common aspects which can define as good our duties to travel abroad: some of the most recognised (and in many cases envied by our friends) are:
- The leisure aspect: visiting places, new or know ones, and having the chance to do some sightseeing, tasting local food, enjoying some cultural visits (museums, a Meeting in presence people we know (perhaps they are now friends) and spend so good time and a chat after working time of the project.
- Having the chance to meet colleagues and professionals and discuss beyond the project contents: it is mind-opening to exchange talks over professional matters, over new project ideas, over political situations in different countries listening to reals voices what is reported on the news
- Improve the knowledge of our project partners (and potential partners for new proposals) by learning about them in the contest they operate. Touching by hand the location, the venues, the local community, and the people they work with enables a deeper knowledge of our partners and this might not just value them in our sight but understand their potential beyond the first introduction and presentations (perhaps online via PPT).
- Learning by observing on-site working methodology, services, and structural elements of the partners we join in their location shall offer us hints for new initiatives which we can transfer to our organisation or promote in our local context.
- In the case of training activities, the exchange with colleagues while learning new topics in a transnational context represents an educational event a harbinger of progress and personal/professional enrichment that is unique and difficult to find in online or face-to-face training proposals with a purely local characterisation.
- For the study visits, the added value of the on-site presence, the result of relocation and mobility, consists of the direct and personal encounter with the people, the service providers, the structural aspects of the initiatives, and the lively and personal experience often shared by the direct beneficiaries of the initiatives. In short, a more unique than rare opportunity.
What are the annoyances and the unpleasant parts of travelling as a project manager?
And yes, there is another side to the coin. Being on the move might have its disadvantages. Traveling can be upsetting and tiresome, uninteresting, and unexciting. And this is for some reasons.
- Travel absorbs energy, and meetings and in-person training absorb the project manager’s time. Often the entire day is taken up by work for a meeting, training, and study visits to different locations. Therefore, when the consortium work is finished, the project manager has to deal with back-office work that he or she could not manage during the meeting. In frequent cases, this means that after hours of meeting (habitually lasting until the end of the afternoon) the professional has to return to the hotel to answer emails, make phone calls, manage some deadlines when it is not a matter of finalising the writing of a project or deliverables that have to be ready for submission. There remains, at the end of a day’s work, other work to be done and for some this may even mean giving up a sightseeing tour organised by the host, an official dinner with partners, a moment of rest in their hotel room.
- Time also becomes extended; every so often for a meeting of a day or day and a half one has to travel, depending on the accessibility of the destination, a total of 3-4 days, one day each way, and then to attend the meeting. A lot of time. In addition, if meetings are scheduled at the beginning of the week or the end of the working week, it is possible that a piece of the journey must be made on non-working days, which employees in particular often do not like at all because it takes time away from their private and family lives.
- Then we want to talk about the inevitable travel hiccups. Here we could recount an endless list of small inconveniences typical of travelling abroad: delays that make you miss connections arriving well after the scheduled times with consequences such as missing dinner, missing the last means of transport to the final destination (with necessary change of schedule), the need to work while travelling (open and operational PCs while flying, sitting on an airport bench, phone calls made while moving from one terminal to another, etc.).
- Some destinations, compared to our point of departure, have early morning flight schedules with the additional need to reach the airport at least an hour before boarding. Often lack of means operational at that time requires us to incur additional expenses for night taxis, getting up at times that are not exactly physiological, not to talk about time zones to be changed even for just two days. For friends who live at the extremes of European time zones (think of the Balkans, Greece Turkey on the one hand and Ireland, Iceland Portugal on the other) who when travelling are forced to adjust to new times (for waking up, dinners, starting work, etc.) that are even two or three hours different from where they come from. It is imaginable that such a wide time difference for even just two days of work also leaves its marks on our daily biorhythms (at least for a couple of days).
So, next time you see posts and pictures on social media of colleagues or friends of yours, project managers, showcasing monuments, panoramas, dishes of food, and other enviable items think also of the uncomfortable matters of his journey. It will be fair to them!